NAVIGATE: Understanding NAture's multiple Values for InteGrATion into dEcisions

Human activities are directly and indirectly depleting the World's natural resources. At the same time, we rely on these resources for our livelihoods and well-being. Urgent action is thus needed to better manage our impact on the natural world. A key factor driving these negative impacts is that the decisions that people, businesses and governments make tend to be based on a limited set of nature's values that tend to be linked to economic markets. In biodiversity economics, these values are called 'instrumental' values: the predominantly monetary benefits of goods and services people obtain from nature. However, the global assessment on the value of nature has identified several other 'non-instrumental' value concepts, which include: relational values (the value we have for our relationships with nature); transcendental values (our overarching principles and life goals); shared values (collective values that expressed by groups, communities and cultures); and intrinsic values (values for nature independent of human welfare). NAVIGATE aims to enhance our understanding of these non-instrumental value concepts and explore how these values might be better integrated into economic thinking and policy decisions.

Our research will undertake detailed reviews of the 'non-instrumental' value concepts. We will draw on a range of scientific perspectives to provide greater clarity on definitions of these value concepts, how they might be measured (using both monetary and other indicators) and how they might best be integrated into policy and business decisions. We will also ask decision makers whether they currently consider these values, and if not, how they think they could incorporate them. Based on the above, we will develop methods for assessing these values and feeding them into policies.

To test our ideas, we will apply our methods to four case studies that will value the non-instrumental values associated with forests and woodlands. Our case studies include: the UK national forest; a new woodland that has recently been planted in Wales to store carbon, reduce flooding and promote outdoor recreation; urban woodland in the City of Helsinki, Finland; and conservation woodlands in Tanzania that provide timber products to the UK market. With the help of local stakeholders and policy makers, we will explore options to feed our findings relating to the value of our case study forests / woodland into actual policy decisions, through a range of existing and new approaches, such as cost-benefit analysis, natural capital accounting and deliberative democratic valuations. Conventional economic measures tend to only consider the instrumental values of nature, but it has been argued that better decisions could be made for our planet if the policies also account for a wider range of values including non-instrumental values, expressed in both monetary and non-monetary terms.

The outputs from our research will include: a series of scientific papers and policy guidance documents for embedding non-instrumental values into decisions. We will also produce a video and infographics to explain the implications of our research to the public.